About the why's of homelessness: some excerpts from "Rough Sleepers"

The Rise in Homelessness

"A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness.  But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; the grossly inadequate provisions that had been made for mentally ill people since the nation began to close its psychiatric hospitals; the decline in jobs and wages for unskilled workers; the continuation of racist housing policies such as redlining and racially disproportionate evictions; the AIDS epidemic and the drug epidemics that fed it.  Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability--a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn't need it.  

Many commentators and scholars have written that the Reagan administration fostered the rise in homelessness, with its deep cuts in programs for the poor and policies that led to declines in the supply of inexpensive housing.  Some responsibility for those cuts and policies also belonged to Democrats, who had controlled the House for all eight years of Reagan's term and the Senate during the last two.  Homelessness grew rapidly during Reagan's time, and it continued to grow with every presidency that followed.  Given the problem's complex etiology, no single group can be blamed for all its constituent parts."   pg 52-53

"The shuttering of mental hospitals and the failure to create adequate replacements for them contributed to the size and complexity of modern homelessness.  But homelessness afflicted many other Americans, along with the mentally ill.  The president's [Regan's] claim that a lot of unemployed people didn't want to work was at best simplistic--most ads for jobs were aimed at skilled workers.  And in asserting that many people preferred the streets to shelters and were therefore homeless by choice, Reagan in effect conflated homeless shelters with homes."  pg 53

Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers, Random House, 2023

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